Monthly Archives: November 2014

Skeptic Summaries

Layman’s Primer on the Climate Skeptic Position

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I am a “lukewarmer”, which means a skeptic that agrees that man-made CO2 is incrementally warming the Earth but believes that the amount of that warming is being greatly exaggerated.  In addition, I believe that the science behind evidence of current “climate change” is really poor, with folks in the media using observations of tail-of-the-distribution weather effects to “prove” climate change rather than relying on actual trend data (which tend to show no such thing).

I have written two articles at Forbes.com summarizing this position and the debate.

Understanding the Global Warming Debate

Denying the Catastrophe: The Science of the Climate Skeptic’s Position

CO2 Abatement

When Climate Alarmism Limits Environmental Progress

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One of my favorite sayings is that “years from now, environmentalists will look back on the current obsession with global warming and say that it did incredible harm to real environmental progress.”  The reason is that there are many environmental problems worse than the likely impact of man-made global warming that would cost substantially less money to solve. The focus on climate change has sucked all the oxygen out of every other environmental improvement effort.

The recent Obama climate discussions with China are a great example.  China has horrendous environmental problems that need to be solved long before they worry about CO2 production.

Take coal plants.  Coal plants produce a lot of CO2, but without the aid of modern scrubbers and such, they also produce SOx, NOx, particulates matter and all the other crap you see in the Beijing air.  The problem is that the CO2 production from a coal plant takes as much as 10-100x more money to eliminate than it takes to eliminate all the other bad stuff.

While economically rational technology exists to get rid of all the other bad stuff from coal (technology that is currently in use at most US coal plants), there is no reasonable technology to eliminate CO2 from coal.  The only option is to substitute things like wind and solar which are much more expensive, in addition to a number of other drawbacks.

What this means is that the same amount of money needed to replace a couple percent of the Chinese coal industry with carbon-less technologies could probably add scrubbers to all the coal plants.  Thus the same money needed to make an only incremental change in CO2 output would make an enormous change in the breath-ability of air in Chinese cities.

So if we care about the Chinese people, why are we pushing them to worry about CO2?

PS-  by the way, there have been a number of studies that have attributed a lot of the Arctic and Greenland ice melting to the albedo effect of coal combustion particulate matter from China deposited on the ice.  The same technology that would make Beijing air breathable might also reduce Arctic ice melts.

Skeptic Summaries

Why We Are Exaggerating “Extreme Weather”

I have written in article at Forbes.com called Summer of the Shark, Global Warming Edition.  It describes why the media, and many average citizens, are exaggerating the degree and effects of extreme weather.  Here is a preview of that article, but I encourage you to read it all

In the summer of 2001, a little boy in Mississippi lost an arm in a shark attack.  The media went absolutely crazy.  For weeks and months they highlighted every shark attack on the evening news.  They ran aerial footage of sharks in the water near beaches.  They coined the term “Summer of the Shark.”  According to Wikipedia, shark attacks were the number three story, in terms of network news time dedicated, of the summer.

Bombarded by such coverage, most Americans responded to polls by saying they were concerned about the uptick in shark attacks.  In fact, there were actually about 10% fewer shark attacks in 2001 than in 2000.  Our perceptions were severely biased by the coverage.

Similarly, every bit of severe weather now makes the news, so the American public can be forgiven for thinking that maybe such weather is increasing.  But when one actually looks at data, it’s hard to see good evidence of a shift in severe weather.  Neitherextreme wet weather, extreme dry weather, tornadoes, or hurricanes show any real upward trend.  Sure we had some 100-year high temperatures in the US in March.  But in the same month the rest of the world was at or below its average temperature for the last couple of decades.

 

Climate Science Process

HydroInfra: Scam! Investment Honeypot for Climate Alarmists

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Cross-posted from Coyoteblog.

I got an email today from some random Gmail account asking me to write about HyrdoInfra.  OK.  The email begins: “HydroInfra Technologies (HIT) is a Stockholm based clean tech company that has developed an innovative approach to neutralizing carbon fuel emissions from power plants and other polluting industries that burn fossil fuels.”

Does it eliminate CO2?  NOx?  Particulates?  SOx?  I actually was at the bottom of my inbox for once so I went to the site.  I went to this applications page.  Apparently, it eliminates the “toxic cocktail” of pollutants that include all the ones I mentioned plus mercury and heavy metals.  Wow!  That is some stuff.

Their key product is a process for making something they call “HyrdroAtomic Nano Gas” or HNG.  It sounds like their PR guys got Michael Crichton and JJ Abrams drunk in a brainstorming session for pseudo-scientific names.

But hold on, this is the best part.  Check out the description of HNG and how it is made:

Splitting water (H20) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O.

This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.

We took a different approach by postulating that we could split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.

A specific low energy pulse is put into water. The water molecules line up in a certain structure and are split from the Hydrogen molecules.

The result is HNG.

HNG is packed with ‘Exotic Hydrogen’

Exotic Hydrogen is a recent scientific discovery.

HNG carries an abundance of Exotic Hydrogen and Oxygen.

On a Molecular level, HNG is a specific ratio mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

The unique qualities of HNG show that the placement of its’ charged electrons turns HNG into an abundant source of exotic Hydrogen.

HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen.

Some basic facts:

  • HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions
  • HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars.
  • HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second.
  • Oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame.
  • HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the center thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
  • HNG is stored in canisters, arrayed around the emission outlet channels. HNG is injected into the outlets to safely & effectively clean up the burning of fossil fuels.
  • The pollution emissions are neutralized instantly & safely with no residual toxic cocktail or chemicals to manage after the HNG burning process is initiated.

Exotic Hyrdrogen!  I love it.  This is probably a component of the “red matter” in the Abrams Star Trek reboot.  Honestly, someone please tell me this a joke, a honeypot for mindless environmental activist drones.    What are the chemical reactions going on here?  If CO2 is captured, what form does it take?  How does a mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules in whatever state they are in do anything with heavy metals?  None of this is on the website.   On their “validation” page, they have big labels like “Horiba” that look like organizations thave somehow put their impremature on the study.  In fact, they are just names of analytical equipment makers.  It’s like putting “IBM” in big print on your climate study because you ran your model on an IBM computer.

SCAM!  Honestly, when you see an article written to attract investment that sounds sort of impressive to laymen but makes absolutely no sense to anyone who knows the smallest about of Chemistry or Physics, it is an investment scam.

But they seem to get a lot of positive press.  In my search of Google, everything in the first ten pages or so are just uncritical republication of their press releases in environmental and business blogs.   You actually have to go into the comments sections of these articles to find anyone willing to observe this is all total BS.   If you want to totally understand why the global warming debate gets nowhere, watch commenter Michael at this link desperately try to hold onto his faith in HydroInfra while people who actually know things try to explain why this makes no sens

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Switching Back to Disqus

For a variety of reasons, I had to turn off Disqus a while back.  We are going back to it for comments.  Over the next few days you may see comments on old posts disappear and reappear.  If I don’t screw up, within 48 hours all existing comments should be back.